How would it be possible to better start the year than with a series of poets « who share works reflecting on 2017 in the hopes of giving us perspective for the year ahead » ?
Find them all on DAZED DIGITAL
A series of poets share works reflecting on 2017 in the hopes of giving us perspective for the year ahead
This might sound obvious but, a lot happened in 2017. From the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower Fire to Trump’s inauguration, there was a powerful stream of protests and marches, a backlash against refugees, and a painful but progressive fight for advancements in how we understand gender and sexuality. All of us, surely, had our own shit to deal with too.
Art – specifically poetry – has always helped put turbulent times into perspective. Which is why New River Press – founded by poets and partners, Greta Bellamacina and Robert Montgomery in London in 2016 – is a welcome addition to bookshelves everywhere. At the tail end of last year, the indie poetry press published the New River Press Poetry Yearbook 2017/18: Year of the Propaganda Corrupted Eclipse, a collection of poems, edited by Heathcote Ruthven, which is as meaty as its title suggests. Featuring emerging and established poets tackling an array of themes, we asked the team at New River Press to shine a light on a selection of poets and their accompanying poems that might give you some perspective on the impending year.
I am happy to be part of the group ! So they say : “Barbara Polla is unstoppable. She cut her teeth as a surgeon, writing hundreds of research papers for medical journals, then was a Liberal MP in her native Switzerland, fighting for abortion rights – and now, she is a curator and owner of the innovative gallery Analix Forever in Geneva. Her mostly short poems are the raw, sexy, surreal, and comic snapshots of a restless imagination. It’s like nothing you’ve ever read. New River Press is proud to be publishing her first book of poems later this year.”
Stay tuned ! Poetry is flowing !
Lily Cheifetz-Fong (11 years old), the youngest poet of the group, writes:
White, cold bone,
The colour of the day of the dead masks hanging on the
wall,
Hanging like a visage with nothing behind it,
Nothing to think or to love, like parts of our world,
The masks we buy with gold, shimmering like the only
hope left in a Syrian family’s money box,
To me a mask is a small luxury.
Amaryllis red dripping like serene dew drops onto the
ravaged remains of a life,
Ebbing through the cracks like a trickle of water seeps
hatred,
A mother desperately trying to gather the remains of a
ruined life and put them back together piece by piece.
My fingers clicked on the lettered keys,
Clinking heavy like a ball and chain,
They said I was too serious to beat their high market,
They said that no-one’s fingers would be blackened from
the print of my ‘seriousness’,
Only after they read what they want to read would they
go and gasp, and wash their dirty fingers from the lying
print,
I know they are too scared to face the grim reality; to face
the fact that they are being lied to over and over,
So they lock the room swimming with lies.
(excerpt from « TOO SERIOUS »)
« We should all learn it by heart until our hearts explode. »
Le Nouveau Blog de Barbara Polla 
This poem is gripping.